SOP Need some comment

[Runzy]

Ready to listen to any comment. Don't hesitate to criticize.

When winning the first place out of 240,000 students in the National College Entrance Examination of *** Province in 2008, I was overwhelmingly praised by my townsmen, which abashed me seriously. After all, I made no virtual contribution to my hometown, ***City, which was left far behind in economic growth in the past decade by many other cities much more underdeveloped before. Deeply worried about its economic stagnancy, I felt obligated to dig out the underlying causes. Being enrolled in Guanghua School of Management (GSM) of Peking University, enjoyable taste of economics courses shed light on my search for the key to anatomizing the problems: economics. Knowing that insightful explanations of the economy should precede any policy proposal, I develop an increasingly stronger will in my mind, namely to be an economist and to find out the rationales behind the myriad economic phenomena. Particularly, the predominant role that humans play in the economy and the ubiquitous function of labor in all economic areas have piqued my special interest to study labor and demographic economics.

Stringent training in Economics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Probability Theory, Statistics and Econometrics, and my passion for research have driven me to undertake hands-on academic practice, which not only familiarized myself with the panorama of doing research but also gave me much fun of independent exploration. From April to August 2011, inspired by the substantial role of human capital in economic development and the instinct of being a learner of finance, I inquired into the potential influence of human capital on corporate governance. Indeed, Zingales (2000) already claimed that the combination of independent press and educated investors, who read the newspaper and sanction improper behavior, could have a positive corporate governance effect. In my analysis, the local residents are divided into investors and non-investors. As for the investors, they have a preference for local stocks (Coval and Moskowitz, 1999; Huberman, 2001) and are more likely to take part in corporate governance if well educated. Concerning non-investors, they can exert influence on the decision makers of listed companies through the reputation mechanism once the relevant news is disclosed and disseminated by the media. To examine my hypothesis, by using the random effect model, I correlated the local general corporate governance level with the power of news media and the human capital of the local residents based on the panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2005 to 2007. Four months' data collection and processing, literature review, modeling and examination eventually verified my assumption—local average human capital can significantly elevate the regional corporate governance level.

To train myself to become a qualified researcher, I have worked as Research Assistant dealing with different types of assignments, including processing data with SAS for Prof. *** of my school in October 2010, collecting first-hand information for GSM's Prof. *** from July to October 2011, and reviewing literature for Prof. *** of the China Center for Economic Research in November 2011, among which the experience in Prof. * 's project is the most mentionable. Granted by the National Natural Science Foundation of 2011, Prof. * was to study the difference of starting new businesses between returnees and the local of China. As part of the project, I conduct depth interviews with entrepreneurs to compose a case study on their entrepreneurship patterns. Particularly, I reminded Prof. Lu of the potential selection bias of our research sample, i.e. the returnees returned to China might be because they had anticipated that they would behave similarly as the local, otherwise they wouldn't be able to readapt to the business and cultural environment in China. Therefore, the presumed difference could be invisible. Encouragingly, Prof. * acknowledged my view and decided to take the bias into consideration in the research to be continued. Hereafter, I bore it in mind that I should always keep scrupulous about the selection of the research sample and minimize latent deficiencies in advance in my future academic investigation.

My research interest was directed to the interaction between self-employment and employment as I learned from the aforementioned work that the government's support is almost the most influential factor in the birth and development of the new firms in China. This makes me wonder how the self-employment and the subsequent employment are subject to relevant policies. In 2008, the China government launched a project, with 82 cities selected to promote themselves to become national entrepreneurial cities. Explicitly stated in the official announcement, the project aims to boost employment by encouraging self-employment, and local governments are required to independently devise corresponding measures. Three years has passed and now it's high time to examine the exact efficiency of the project. I'd like to find out whether the project contributes to increasing self-employment and employment in selected cities. Furthermore, I plan to analyze the varying impact of various actions taken by selected cities, thereby provide an instructive reference to policy makers to perfect the policies.

I am fascinated by the ways that the field of Economics can enhance the understanding of the real world with its research tools. I am determined to pursue a career in this field because of its potential to help people through education, research, and the potential to tackle development conundrums.

The School of Economics and Finance at the University of ***　provides a vigorous curriculum and broad research programs that can accelerate my dream of being an economic researcher. Moreover, I hope to have access to the ** Centre for Economic Research to fulfill my special interest in economic affairs in mainland China. And I am tempted by Prof. Wing Suen's study of the labor market of Hong Kong, Prof. Vere's research into labor market effects of demographic change and Prof. Chan's analysis of the dynamics of labor market. I wish to be granted an opportunity to study at HKU and to explore the unknown with the intellectuals there. Hopefully, I can add to the diversity of HKU with my Chinese rural background.

Your favorable consideration will be greatly appreciated.

[Runzy]

Anyone to comment ? Please...

[Helpplease123]

Putting content aside since i'm no SoP expert and am only just writing my own now...I would suggest that you go over the quality of your English language and maybe try less to use "big words" and more just try for it to just be correct. I don't mean that rudely, your English is impressive but I just think that by trying to make it sound fancy, some of the content may be misunderstood. For example, the first sentence doesn't really make any sense and no one says townsmen, in fact it sounds a bit like a sentence that gets churned out by one of those language translation websites. Anyway, as I said, you're not English and so am very impressed with your language but I think you may be better off toning it down a bit.

[Runzy]

Putting content aside since i'm no SoP expert and am only just writing my own now...I would suggest that you go over the quality of your English language and maybe try less to use "big words" and more just try for it to just be correct. I don't mean that rudely, your English is impressive but I just think that by trying to make it sound fancy, some of the content may be misunderstood. For example, the first sentence doesn't really make any sense and no one says townsmen, in fact it sounds a bit like a sentence that gets churned out by one of those language translation websites. Anyway, as I said, you're not English and so am very impressed with your language but I think you may be better off toning it down a bit.

Thank you, Helpplease123! Your comment is of great help. It's so nice of you to point out the problems directly. I really appreciate it.